Posted on 12/28/2018 8:33:08 AM PST by Black Agnes
They had a great appliance division for a very long time. We bought our last mattress set from them, but it wasn’t exclusive to Sears.
Sears died about twenty years ago.
It just took this long for the body to die.
You are correct. It went into hospice care about then.
Then the top dogs got rid of any assets that had any transferable value. Leaving the stock holders with nothing.t
Then the Hospice unit pulled the plug.
and in conjunction with this financial gutting, Lampert (who has zero experience in retail) personally ran Sears Holding as CEO, and during his tenure both as CEO and board chairman, not a penny was spent on infrastructure improvements (such as replacing Sears’ antique 1970’s point of sales system), and marketing (such as TV ads, flyer mailings, Internet ads, and newspaper inserts) was pretty much cut to zero
Marketing and modern point of sales systems are pretty much Retail 101, so it looks to me like Lampert was indeed deliberately destroying Sears ...
Twenty years ago if Sears would have revived it’s catalog and put it on line the could have beaten Amazon to the punch.
“When there’s a crook at the top of a company it always filters down...”
Amen!
The top crook hires and promotes little crooks like himself at all levels. Eventually, the customers and creditors wake and realize what is happening and leave.
Just another example of the slow death of brick and mortar stores.
Yes! Sears will be just one of many in the next 5-10 years.
Exactly. Craftsman was the only reason I've stepped foot in one of those mausoleums in the past decade. I used to buy their work boots, but found I like CAT better. Appliances? Clothes? Electronics? Auto repair? Please.
With the store closures, even going there for tools would be a pain, but now Lowe's sells Craftsman hand tools and there's one 3/4 mile from my house. So does Ace, and they're only a mile further.
Forget the lawsuits, what about shareholder assassination attempts?
My wife loved the household furnishing department at our nearest Sears. Great people, great choices and Sears’ guarantee.
About every 10 years she redoes the inside of our home, and Sears was her go to store for most of the redo.
She stopped dealing with them about 10 years ago. She used former Sears employees to remove, set up and install drapes, and to paint. A local carpet store, the owner was a former Sears employee did a great job of removing old carpet, installing new padding and the new carpet.
Craftsman tools has apparently been sold to a lot of different vendors. The quality is not like what I inherited from my Dad.
My wife managed a Sears Appliance Store for about five years. During that time she noted that instead of a CEO urging its workers to be a team, Sears put them in competition with each other. For instance, he put “service” in competition with “sales”. “Service”, which once Sears was famous for, was almost non-existent. They would claim said appliance “couldn’t be repaired”, requiring my wife - and other store managers - to take the “hit” and give the customer a “free” replacement. Then, some maintenance guy would take the defective one “to the dump (home)”, do a quick repair, and use it forever.
They had lots of crazy rules, all designed so that the local stores took the losses.
The only thing I remember good was good health/dental insurance.
Eventually, Sears closed most Home Appliance Showrooms, and sold the remaining to “franchisees”.
I’m glad she left there, they were working her to death.
I worked in the retail industry for years.
CEOs routinely engaged in behavior that by rights
ought to be considered criminal.
Repeated Chapter 11 filings were little more than a way to stick it to their vendors. And they played outrageous legal games of hide-and-seek with their assets.
Other than its massive real estate portfolio (and leases - in the old days, long-term leases could have significant value, but as brick-and-mortar retailing space is shrinking, I don’t know whether that’s as true now), Sears had valuable brands that they’ve sold off, or are selling off, such as Craftsman, and Kenmore.
Just for Craftsman, Sears got nearly a billion dollars.
“He sounds like a psychopath. He probably sleeps more soundly than anyone else either of us know.’
indeed. psychopaths have neither human empathy nor human conscious ... in other words, psychopaths are not human at all, but simply predatory animals who view real humans as food ...
Yes I agree. In the 90s they had already taken their huge catalogue fulfillment center in KC and sold it off to the USPS for a distribution center.
It costs a lot to reconfigure a store space for a new tenant.
But a lot of mall owners are optimistic and think that they can charge more to new tenants than Sears paid.
Sears also had a lot of urban real estate that's been rented out to restaurants and smaller retail operations, or demolished and used for new office buildings or apartments.
So they think there's a market for mall retail space? I'm surprised.
Lowe's sells Craftsman brand hand tools THAT ARE MADE IN CHINA. Lowe's own Kobalt brand is better now, as many of them are made domestically.
It is true, you can buy a "taxable loss" that will offset a "taxable gain" in the future. If the price is right, you win.
In the early 80s, I sold "tax-leveraged leases" to major companies which were not profitable that year, that allowed a much lower apparent monthly "charge" because we sold the tax {loss} benefits to wealthy individuals, i.e. doctors, lawyers, etc. that wanted to shelter income against fed taxes, while making a profit.
We knew how to do that, and it worked until Ronaldus change the tax system, and put my company out of business {but it should have been because we were eating out of the tax trough}.
The highest tax rate was 78%, I was in it, and never paid a dime in federal income tax, until RR changed to code and went from 78% to 28% and it cost me six figures in fed taxes. Oh, did I mention, they eliminated a boatload of offset deductions, and instituted a gimmick called the "alternative minimum" which meant, we gotcha.
I think Craftsman tools are still pretty good, but I admit they’re not the Craftsman of 30 years ago.
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